What is System Maintainability Analysis?

Maintainability is defined as the probability of performing a successful repair action within a given time. In other words, maintainability measures the ease and speed with which a system can be restored to operational status after a failure occurs. This is similar to system reliability analysis except that the random variable of interest in maintainability analysis is time-to-repair rather than time-to-failure. For example, if it is said that a particular component has a 90% maintainability for one hour, this means that there is a 90% probability that the component will be repaired within an hour. When you combine system maintainability analysis with system reliability analysis, you can obtain many useful results concerning the overall performance (availability, uptime, downtime, etc.) that will help you to make decisions about the design and/or operation of a repairable system.